TED-ED Site Uses Animation for Education

Over the past few years, TED’s thought-provoking conferences have offered a great way of sharing ideas, stories and methods of understanding our world. Now the non-profit group behind TED has launched a new website devoted to video lessons which blend animation and live-actions to help teachers and inspire students online.

A beta version of TED-Ed website went live at ed.ted.com on Wednesday with an open invitation to teachers to use video clips from its nascent library or Google-owned YouTube for assignments. TED curator Chris Anderson introduced the website as an innovative, open platform for using video in education.

“It allows any teacher to take a video of their choice and make it the heart of a ‘lesson’ that can easily be assigned in class or as homework, complete with context, follow-up questions and further resources,” Anderson said. “By turning great lessons into vivid scholastic tools, these TED-Ed videos are designed to catalyze curiosity.”

TED-Ed’s mission is to make learning irresistible by teaming top teachers with talented animators in fun videos that entertain while imparting knowledge.

The website, which is backed by a $1.25 million commitment from U.S. department store chain Kohl’s, allows teachers to build real-world lessons around educational videos. The site is the second phase of a TED-Ed project started last month with the launch of an education channel on YouTube. Videos at youtube.com/tededucation logged more than 2.4 million views and attracted approximately 42,000 subscribers in the five weeks after TED launched the channel.

TED-ED

TED (Technology, Entertainment and Design) is a nonprofit that organizes a series of conferences dedicated to “ideas worth spreading.” Speakers are given only 18 minutes to deliver “the talk of their lives.”